Brian Sewell - Art Criticism

Art Criticism

In 1984, he became art critic for the Evening Standard (replacing avant-garde critic Richard Cork). He won press awards including Critic of the Year in 1988, Arts Journalist of the Year in 1994, the Hawthornden Prize for Art Criticism in 1995 and the Foreign Press Award (Arts) in 2000. In April 2003 he was awarded the George Orwell Prize for his column in the Evening Standard.

In criticisms of the Tate Gallery's art, he coined the phrase, the "Serota Tendency", after its director Nicholas Serota. Although he appeared on BBC Radio 4 in the early 1990s, it was not until the late 1990s that he became a household figure through his appearances on television. He is known for his formal, old-fashioned RP diction and for his anti-populist sentiments. He offended people in Gateshead by claiming an exhibition was too important to be held only at the town's Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and should be shown to "more sophisticated" audiences in London; he has also disparaged Liverpool as a cultural city.

In 1994, 35 art world signatories wrote a letter to the Evening Standard attacking Sewell for "homophobia", "misogyny", "demagogy", "hypocrisy", "artistic prejudice", "formulaic insults and predictable scurrility". Signatories included Karsten Schubert, Maureen Paley, Michael Craig-Martin, Angela and Matthew Flowers, Professor Christopher Frayling, Rene Gimpel, Susan Hiller, John Hoyland, Sarah Kent, Nicholas Logsdail, George Melly, Sandy Nairne, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, Bridget Riley, Michelle Roberts, Richard Shone, Marina Warner, Natalie Wheen, and Rachel Whiteread.

He responded with comments on many of the signatories, saying that Paley was "the curatrix of innumerable silly little Arts Council exhibitions", and that Whiteread was "mortified by my dismissal of her work for the Turner Prize". A letter supporting Sewell from 20 other art world signatories accused the writers of attempted censorship to promote "a relentless programme of neo-conceptual art in all the main London venues".

Sewell's attitude to female artists has been controversial. In July 2008 he was quoted in The Independent as saying:

"The art market is not sexist. The likes of Bridget Riley and Louise Bourgeois are of the second and third rank. There has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50 per cent or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late 20s or 30s. Maybe it's something to do with bearing children."

Sewell is notably outspoken with his opinions, and has frequently insulted the general public for their views on art. He has been quoted, with regard to public praise for the work of Banksy in Bristol, as follows:

"The public doesn't know good from bad. For this city to be guided by the opinion of people who don't know anything about art is lunacy. It doesn't matter if they like it."

He went on to assert that Banksy himself "should have been put down at birth." Media personality Clive Anderson has described him as "a man intent on keeping his Christmas card list nice and short."

Sewell is also known for his disdain for Damien Hirst, describing him as "fucking dreadful".

A review in the Evening Standard of the David Hockney Royal Academy Exhibition titled 'A Bigger Picture' Sewell summed up his review by saying:

"Hockney is not another Turner expressing, in high seriousness, his debt to the old master; Hockney is not another Picasso teasing Velázquez and Delacroix with not quite enough wit; here Hockney is a vulgar prankster, trivialising not only a painting that he is incapable of understanding and could never execute, but in involving him in the various parodies, demeaning Picasso too.", 19 January 2012.